What is the ‘right’ amount of content when marketing to consumers through email?

With permission-based email marketing, businesses can communicate to a wide target audience (MailChimp, 2016) and influence the consumer behaviours through online shopping (Reimers, Chao & Gorman, 2015). As one of the biggest return-on-investments, email marketing (if done well) has been proven to create customer relationships and overall online sales (eConsultancy, 2016).

There are many attributes of email to consider when communicating products/services, sales promotions, advertorial messages and branding. With competition continuously increasing across all industries, businesses need to make sure that their email marketing stands out from the crowd. I was recently asked whether the email length actually matters in B2C email marketing… To this, my answer is that it’s not so much the length of the email, but the quality and relevance of the content is an entire different story.

One of the main bad practise in email marketing is by adding too much irrelevant content in their email communications. Content Marketing Institute (2016), expresses that email content should be ‘quality over quantity’, meaning that content must be valuable to the intended consumer. We all know this, but companies are still over-loading emails with ‘irrelevant’ or unnecessary’ content.

This unsurprisingly has a negative effect on the receiver as there is too much information to take in and the receiver may not understand the intended message(s). Especially on mobile, where 20% of recipients open emails on mobile devices, overloading content can often result in dis-regarding the emails (Gao, 2016).

An email sent on 29th January 2016 by Montezuma’s with a subject heading of “Free Chocolate Flower with all online orders over £35!” the obvious message here is promoting this offer in the lead up to Valentines. However included within the email body was content to do with baby gifts and the announcement of a new store. When reading through the email, this is a prime example of how consumers can get confused between the intended messages!

On the other hand, by not including enough content can also result in the same negative impact of little engagement, as the receiver may not understand the intended message due to missing relevant content (Net Atlantic, 2016).

When it comes to email marketing, unfortunately ‘one size’ does not fit all and email content will vary on many factors:

Your target. Companies marketing to business customers are advised to use plain-text emails (rather than HTML) as this is easier to handle when viewing on mobile devices. This means that content such as imagery and animation will not be appropriate within this context.


The ‘target’ expands more to just B2B and B2C however. Content should also vary depending on the particular target segment, influencing the type of imagery, fonts and colours being used.

The primary message will also determine the amount of content required. For example, emails offering a special promotion discount will require less content to get the message across.

The type of email. For example, an email with the intention to promote a new product/service would include less content compared to an email which was part of a monthly newsletter, where there will be detail into the company and industry etc.

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So, what now?

• Include imagery within HTML emails where appropriate (B2C) and embedded call-to-actions, as this would reduce the amount of textual content required to get the desired message across. With this in mind, the imagery chosen should be relevant, appropriate and eye-catching for the consumer.
• Degraff (2014) advises companies to use bigger fonts within their textual elements (at least 14 pts paragraph and 22 pts for headings). Smaller fonts have a tendency to detract consumers from the email, contributing to this lack of interest.
• If you are experience a decline in interaction with your emails such as reduced click-through or open rates, it is always worth applying A/B email testing to send different content and email lengths to separate segments, and monitor the engagement.
• Create an email template and an annual content plan (for each marketing message) to maintain brand consistency and usability from customers.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog – good luck with your email content marketing!

REFERENCES:
Content Marketing Institute. (2016). What Is Content Marketing? [Online]. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/. [Accessed 10 May 2016].

Degraff, J. (2014). How to Optimize Email Content for Any Screen Size [Online]. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/01/optimize-email-content-any-screen-size/ [Accessed 8 May 2016].

eConsultancy. (2016). Email and CRM Statistics. [Online]. https://econsultancy.com/reports/email-ecrm-statistics/ [Accessed 10 May 2016].

MailChimp. (2016). Email Marketing Field Guide. [Online]. http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-field-guide/html/ [Accessed 9 May 2016].

Net Atlantic. (2016). Is Your Email Campaign Missing the Mark? [Online]. https://www.netatlantic.com/resources/articles/article29-is-your-email-campaign-missing-the-mark. [Accessed 10 May 2016].

Reimers, V., Chai, C. and Gorman, S. (2015). Permission email marketing and its influence on online shopping. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics. Vol 28 (2), 302 – 322.